Len fought his way convulsively past a treacherous sheet and staggered
up, goose-pimpled and tense. "What's wrong?"
"You'll have to sleep on the couch. The sheets are in the bottom--"
"On that couch? Are you crazy?"
"I can't help it," she said in a small faint voice. "Please don't
let's argue. You'll just have to."
"_Why?_"
"We can't sleep in the same bed," she wailed. "He says
it's--oh!--unhygienic!"
* * * * *
Len's contract was not renewed. He got a job waiting on tables in a
resort hotel, an occupation which pays more money than teaching future
citizens the rudiments of three basic sciences, but for which Len had
no aptitude. He lasted three days at it; he was then idle for a week
and a half until his four years of college physics earned him
employment as a clerk in an electrical shop. His employer was a
cheerfully aggressive man who assured Len that there were great
opportunities in radio and television, and firmly believed that
atom-bomb tests were causing all the bad weather.
Moira, in her eighth month, walked to the county library every day and
trundled a load of books home in the perambulator. Little Leo, it
appeared, was working his way simultaneously through biology,
astrophysics, phrenology, chemical engineering, architecture,
Christian Science, psychosomatic medicine, marine law; business
management, Yoga, crystallography, metaphysics and modern literature.
His domination of Moira's life remained absolute, and his experiments
with her regimen continued. One week, she ate nothing but nuts and
fruit, washed down with distilled water; the next, she was on a diet
of porterhouse steak, dandelion greens and Hadacol.
With the coming of full summer, fortunately, few of the high school
staff were in evidence. Len met Dr. Berry once on the street. Berry
started, twitched, and walked off rapidly in an entirely new
direction.
[Illustration]
The diabolical event was due on or about July 29th. Len crossed off
each day on their wall calendar with an emphatic black grease pencil.
It would, he supposed, be an uncomfortable thing at best to be the
parent of a super-prodigy. Leo would no doubt be dictator of the world
by the time he was fifteen, unless he would be assassinated first, but
almost anything would be a fair price for getting Leo out of his
maternal fortress.
Then there was the day when Len came home to find Moira weeping over
the typewriter, with a half-inch stack of manuscript beside her.
"It isn't anything. I'm just tired. He started this after lunch.
Look."
Len turned the face-down sheaf the right way up.
Droning. Abrasing
the demiurge.
Hier begrimms the tale:
Eyes undotted, grewling
and looking, turns off
a larm, seizes cloes.
Stewed Bierly a wretch
Pence, therefore tchews we. Pons!
Let the pants take air of themsulves.
* * * * *
The first three sheets were all like that. The fourth was a perfectly
good Petrarchian sonnet reviling the current administration and the
political party of which Len was a registration-day member.
The fifth was hand-lettered in the Cyrillic alphabet and illustrated
with geometric diagrams. Len put it down and stared shakily at Moira.
"No, go on," she said, "read the rest."
The sixth and seventh were obscene limericks; and the eighth, ninth
and so on to the end of the stack were what looked like the first
chapters of a rattling good historical adventure novel.
Its chief characters were Cyrus the Great, his jaunty-bosomed daughter
Lygea, of whom Len had never previously heard, and a one-armed
Graeco-Mede adventurer named Xanthes. There were also courtesans,
spies, apparitions, scullery slaves, oracles, cutthroats, lepers,
priests and men-at-arms in magnificent profusion.
"He's decided," said Moira, "what he wants to be when he's born."
Leo refused to bothered with mundane details. When there were eighty
pages of the manuscript, it was Moira who invented a title and by-line
for it--_The Virgin of Persepolis_ by Leon Lenn--and mailed it off to
a literary agent in New York. His response, a week later, was
cautiously enthusiastic. He asked for an outline of the remainder of
the novel.
Moira replied that this was impossible, trying to sound as unworldly
and impenetrably artistic as she could. She enclosed the thirty-odd
pages Leo had turned out through her in the meantime.
Nothing was heard from the agent for two weeks. At the end of this
time, Moira received an astonishing document, exquisitely printed and
bound in imitation leather, thirty-two pages including the index,
containing three times as many clauses as a lease.
This turned out to be a book contract. With it came the agent's check
for nine hundred dollars.
* * * * *
Len tilted his mop-handle against the wall and straightened carefully,
conscious of every individual gritty muscle in his back. How did women
do housework every day, seven days a week, fifty-two goddam weeks a
year?
It was a little cooler now that the Sun was down, and he was working
stripped to shorts and bath slippers; but he might as well have been
wearing an overcoat in a Turkish bath.
The faint whisper of Moira's monstrous new electrical typewriter
stopped, leaving a fainter hum. Len went into the living room and
sagged on the arm of a chair. Moira, gleaming sweatily in a flowered
housecoat, was lighting a cigarette.
"How's it going?" he asked, hoping for an answer. He hadn't always
received one.
She switched off the machine wearily. "Page two-eighty-nine. Xanthes
killed Anaxander."
"Thought he would. How about Ganesh and Zeuxias?"
"I don't know." She frowned. "I can't figure it out. You know who it
was that raped Marianne in the garden?"
"No, who?"
"Ganesh."
"You're kidding!"
"Nope." She pointed to the stack of typescript. "See for yourself."
Len didn't move. "But Ganesh was in Lydia, buying back the sapphire.
He didn't return till--"
"I know, I know. But he _wasn't_. That was Zeuxias in a putty nose
with his beard dyed. It's all perfectly logical, the way Leo explains
it. Zeuxias overheard Ganesh talking to the three Mongols--you
remember, Ganesh thought there was somebody behind the curtain, only
that was when they heard Lygea scream, and while their backs were
turned--"
"All right. But for God's sake, this fouls everything up. If Ganesh
never went to Lydia, then he _couldn't_ have had anything to do
distempering Cyrus's armor. And Zeuxias couldn't, either, because--"
"It's exasperating. I know he's going to pull another rabbit out of
the hat and clear everything up, but I don't see how."
Len brooded. "It beats me. It had to be either Ganesh or Zeuxias. Or
Philomenes, though that doesn't seem possible. Look, damn it, if
Zeuxias knew about the sapphire all the time, that rules out
Philomenes once and for all. Unless--no. I forgot about that business
in the temple. Umm. Do you think Leo really knows what he's doing?"
"I'm certain. Lately I've been able to tell what he's thinking even
when he isn't talking to me. I mean just generally, like when he's
puzzling over something, or when he's feeling mean. It's going to be
something brilliant and he knows what it is, but he won't tell me.
We'll just have to wait."
"I guess so." Len stood up, grunting. "You want me to see if there's
anything in the pot?"
"Please."
Len wandered into the kitchen, turned the flame on under the silex,
stared briefly at the dishes waiting in the sink, and wandered out
again. Since the onslaught of The Novel, Leo had relinquished his
interest in Moira's diet, and she had been living on coffee. Small
blessings....
* * * * *
Moira was leaning back with her eyes closed, looking very tired.
"How's the money?" she asked without moving.
"Lousy. We're down to twenty-one bucks."
She raised her head and opened her eyes wide. "We couldn't be! Len,
how could anybody go through nine hundred dollars that fast?"
"Typewriter. And the dictaphone that Leo thought he wanted, till about
half an hour after it was paid for. We spent less than fifty on
ourselves, I think. Rent. Groceries. It goes, when there isn't any
coming in."